1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to an apparatus and method for processing pictures, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for general object of interest detection and isolation, and still more particularly to an apparatus and method for general object of interest detection and isolation followed by a specialized treatment of the object of interest.
2. Description of Related Art
Object recognition in images is still in a relative infancy. Perhaps the most widely known object recognition is crude facial recognition incorporated in some still cameras.
The automatic object of interest identification is a somewhat difficult problem. No known published results have been located to date on general object of interest detection. Research that approaches object of interest detection can be divided roughly into two categories. The first research methodology, usually referred as “bottom-up”, is completely stimulus driven or active even if there is no meaningful object in the image. Saliency point detection belongs to the “bottom-up” category. The second research methodology, usually referred to as “top-down”, is both slower and task dependent. “Top-down” methods focus on specified object categories. Face recognition is one such specified object categories.
In face recognition, object recognition tasks have well defined features such as eyes, nose or mouth that are relatively simple to detect within an image. However, a general object of interest detection method cannot be made task specific since it is a-priori unknown which features or categories may be of interest. Therefore, an object detector should be sufficiently generic so as to be capable of handling large numbers of object categories. While fast and highly accurate object detectors are currently available for some categories, such as faces and cars, their application to other classes is problematic. On the other hand, the stimulus driven approach appears to be unable to lead to a conclusion as to whether or not there is a meaningful object of interest within an image.